[New Project] León Castellanos-Jankiewicz awarded NWO grant for Rearming Europe with Legal Accountability (RELY)

Asser Institute senior researcher León Castellanos-Jankiewicz was awarded an NWO SSH XS Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for the project Rearming Europe with Legal Accountability (RELY).

The RELY project will explore how the European Union can strengthen legal safeguards and human rights strategies to prevent misconduct and ensure state responsibility in arms production and transfer. This research comes at a time when the EU is preparing to invest €800 billion to expand its defence capabilities.

While EU member states are accelerating their rearmament, current regulations lack the due diligence and transparency needed to prevent harm, such as human rights abuses, environmental damage, and weapons falling into the wrong hands.

Alarmingly, European weapons and their components are constantly found in conflict zones and at-risk areas where war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious human rights violations are taking place.

For example, a recent report has identified European firms from Germany, Austria and France as supplying Myanmar’s military junta with materials to produce weapons while circumventing sanctions. Worse still, European arms exports could be contributing to the commission of war crimes in Yemen and Ukraine.

The new RELY project aims to fill this accountability gap by proposing concrete legal solutions at both corporate and state levels. In doing so, the RELY Project will pay particular attention to new EU policies and initiatives, including the European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS), the ReArm Europe/Defence Readiness 2030 initiative and the legislative proposal for a European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) currently under consideration by the European Commission, which aim to ensure availability and supply of defence products through unprecedented EU spending, production and trade.

The project aims to make three distinct contributions: 1) open a new line of enquiry into EU military procurement governance and human rights; 2) generate new empirical knowledge around the implementation of current legal frameworks to understand their limitations in preventing downstream damage, and 3) assess the potential of EU arms procurement as a human rights tool.

NWO SSH XS Grant 2025

The NWO SSH XS Grant is part of the Dutch Research Council’s Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) funding scheme, designed to support promising early-stage research ideas with potential for high societal impact. The grant provides funding for curiosity-driven, innovative projects that explore urgent social issues and aim to bridge academic research with policy and practice.

In the second round of 2025, NWO received 124 eligible applications and awarded funding to 78 proposals. Within Castellanos-Jankiewicz’s group, 16 proposals were submitted, with funding granted to the 10 highest-ranked. RELY secured fourth place in this internal ranking. In its assessment, the peer-review committee praised RELY’s ambition, innovative subject matter, and use of a mixed methodology, noting these features as key strengths of the proposal.

Read the awarded project description

Read more

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About León Castellanos-Jankiewicz

Dr León Castellanos-Jankiewicz is a senior researcher in international law at the Asser Institute and supervisor of the International Law Clinic on Access to Justice for Gun Violence at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the human rights impacts of arms trade and legal accountability in both corporate and state contexts. He regularly advises governments on arms export policies and has led interdisciplinary projects involving policy, advocacy, and multistakeholder engagement. Dr Castellanos-Jankiewicz is the recipient of several international research grants and currently leads the RELY project, which addresses accountability gaps in EU arms production and transfer.